


Stop Coming To My House

by th_esaurus



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Eating Disorders, M/M, Mild D/s, Non-Explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 02:51:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here is a fic about Will Graham not being able to sleep or feed himself properly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stop Coming To My House

Will wakes up at 4.16am, pulls off his soaked tee and hangs it by the neck from his door handle. He goes into the bathroom, stares at the face in the mirror, and tries to decide if it's his or someone else's. That's how he can tell if he's dreaming or not, these days.

 

He won't sleep again, now. He thinks about doing the dishes, to pass time. But the sink is empty; the tabletop too. He supposes he didn't eat last night.

 

He washes up the dogs' bowls instead.

 

*

 

Hannibal comes to his lecture, stands in the doorway watching Will rather than his presentation. "Don't you have patients?" Will snaps at him, as he's packing his notes away.

 

"Jack Crawford has very deep pockets," Hannibal replies, smiling dryly. He has a very thin mouth, and Will looks at it often because he doesn't like looking at people's eyes. "Come along, Will."

 

He takes Will for chai lattes at a small place half a mile off campus, with antique naval flags hung like bunting on the walls. He buys two, and Will drinks them both, and Hannibal sips on a tall glass of sparkling water. He looks disdainful of the surroundings, and Will wonders why he came here at all. A wine bar would suit Hannibal better.

 

Will doesn't really drink.

 

They discuss the Hobbs case, though there is not much new to mull over, and Jack has chided Will more than once about talking cases in public. Hannibal says flippantly it's good for him to associate such extraordinary circumstances with normal, day-to-day life; that separating the two will only make him view one with more weight and trauma than the other. Alana had pursed her lips dourly when Will passed this on.

 

Alana reluctantly trusts Hannibal's professional opinion, but apparently has a harder time trusting him as a person.

 

"Did Hobbs do this, d'you think?" Will says, circling a mug-shaped coffee-stain on their table with his finger. "Did he—live life? Take his daughter for frappuccinos, take his wife out to restaurants, visit bookshops, go see movies?"

 

Hannibal shrugs. He likes Will to draw his own conclusions. "Of course," he says, "But a man like Hobbs does not do these things for the same reason as other men. They are a veneer of normality only. This is why it's so hard for you to picture yourself as Hobbs in these situations – they were not part of his make-up, not part of his wants or desires."

 

Will nods slowly in agreement. He downs half his second latte, and Hannibal laughs, soft and low, reaches out and puts his hand on Will's wrist. "Slower, slower," he says, and when Will risks a glance at his gaze, Hannibal's eyes are on him so, so directly. "There's no pleasure if you can't even taste it."

 

*

 

Will wakes up at 4.38am. Winston is scratching at his door, whining softly, and if Will tries hard enough he can convince himself that's what woke him.

 

He pulls off his soaked tee, and lets the dogs pile in on the bed while he pads around the house. He thinks about frying some eggs.

 

Thinks about it.

 

*

 

He might have dozed off at his laptop because when Hannibal knocks on the front door, Will's lips are wet and he's still only in his shorts. He opens the door first, tells Hannibal shortly he's got a doorbell, then goes to find fresh clothes. The dogs snuffle around his ankles as he picks through for something clean, but not one of them follows him out into the kitchen.

 

Hannibal has a neat stack of white Tupperware, all with cork lids and no labels. He's sautéing something that smells divine and implacable. "You look like a rib rack in a butchers' window," he says flatly, and hands Will a piled-up plate.

 

*

 

Jack drives them out to Leesburg to scope out a not-long abandoned basement stocked with thirteen glass tanks and countless airtight bottles of human blood. Some of them are in freezers, store-bought things, not even industrial, and the ones that wouldn't fit have been left to rot and congeal on woodwork desktops. Hannibal is one of the few who manages not to bury his nose in the crook of his elbow. The stench is ungodly.

 

Jack tells Will the local kids have started crowing about a vampire, and Will shakes his head straight away. "He not drinking it. He wouldn't let it go to waste if he were."

 

"Where are the bodies?"

 

"I don't know. I can't see it yet. The blood is more important to him than the bodies."

 

Jack nods. These things take time. He gives other orders, makes other people make Will's job easier. Will rubs at his eyes underneath his glasses; forgets to take off his gloves first. A smudge of old blood from a poorly bottled jar clings to his cheekbone.

 

"Here," Hannibal says, and turns him away from everybody else before it's noticed. He tilts Will's chin up and wipes at his skin with a handkerchief; returns the cloth to his inside breast pocket.

 

*

Freddie Lounds is brazenly digging through his garbage. Will watches her from his chair on the porch; digs out his cell phone and calls Hannibal. He and Freddie wave at one another.

 

When Hannibal arrives ten minutes later, he asks if Ms Lounds would care to join them for breakfast. "I'm glad someone's feeding him," she shouts across, "there's not even a hot pocket box in here."

 

She puts the lid back on the garbage cans and straightens her coat and drives off.

 

"Ah," Hannibal says, with mock sadness. "Well, I had only brought enough for two, besides. Would you heat the oven for me, Will?"

 

*

 

Alana drops by the next morning with still-warm pancakes. Will thinks about adopting a pitbull to install on the front porch.

 

He's late for work and forgets about breakfast.

 

*

 

Will wakes up at 3.52am and pulls off his soaked tee, and researches missing persons in Leesburg for three hours.

 

*

 

He stands in the bloody basement and imagines walking backwards up the stairs. He has a tank in his hands, heavy and unwieldy under the sloshing weight. It's wrapped haphazardly in a cheap blanket and duct tape. It does not yet smell. Where it has come from is not important.

 

Where it is going is important.

 

"He's not collecting it for himself," Will tells Jack. "Get them to test the blood types."

 

Jack makes it happen.

 

"Some of the boys are picking up Sonic's in an hour or two," he says, offering, as though lunch isn't a non-sequitur.

 

Hannibal turns him down politely. Will murmurs an echo.

 

*

 

Alana has covert meetings with Jack, and then corners Will in the department corridors. "I'm worried about you," she says, her arms crossed. "Are you sleeping?"

 

"Some."

 

"Are you eating?"

 

Will shrugs. "Hannibal's making sure."

 

"When was the last time he made sure?"

 

Will shrugs again.

 

" _Eat,_ " Alana tells him. "You can't go on like this."

 

He checks out the contents of his fridge when he gets back home. It's mostly dog food, and a few leftovers Hannibal said he'd fry up next time he was there. It would be rude of Will to just go ahead and have them, he thinks.

 

He feeds the dogs instead.

 

*

 

Hannibal always offers him the chaise-langue in his office, but Will prefers to stand and wander. He flicks through Hannibal's bookshelves as they talk, mentally noting which books he's read and which he'd ask to borrow if he were the sort of person who borrowed other people's things.

 

When their hour's up, Hannibal offers Will dinner. "Alana onto you too?" Will mutters.

 

Hannibal raises his brow. "Dr. Bloom has never spoken to me about your physical health, I assure you. We're strictly invested in your mind, as professionals."

 

"And as people?"

 

"Is it strange for two people to share, independently, the same concerns?"

 

"Not strange," Will agrees. "Coincidental."

 

They have dinner at Hannibal's, on carefully chosen plates, with spotless crystal wine flutes – cranberry juice for Will, at any rate. He didn't realize how ravenous he was, and though it seems uncouth when the meal's so artful, he nods when offered seconds. Hannibal watches him eat, fingers steepled.

 

"Come here," Hannibal tells him after, and Will bends over by his side as Hannibal dabs the corners of his mouth clean with his pocket handkerchief.

 

*

 

They find their vampire through a trail of stolen medical supplies and the missing person's file of a thirty-seven year old male; orphaned, registered single, in the advanced stages of cancer of the blood. Their killer had been draining every healthy person he could find and pumping it into this thirty-seven year old male; his stricken one-time lover.

 

The lover had been long-dead, of course. This might have been going on for years.

 

It takes another three days before they catch him on the run; and Will misses two appointments with Hannibal for the chase and the paperwork.

 

He picks up a bag of McDonald's fries on his way home, eats a handful, throws up, and then tries to sleep.

 

He wakes up at 2.15am, 4.53am and 6.12am. He didn't bother to put a tee on that night. He cleans his teeth, stares at his face in the bathroom mirror to see if he's still dreaming.

 

He can't tell, because the face in the mirror is too gaunt to be his own, too familiar to be anyone else's.

 

*

 

"I've got a lecture," he says as he opens the front door to Hannibal, pulling on a shirt he can't remember washing any time recently.

 

"Absolutely," Hannibal says, "and absolutely not. I must insist. Please, sit."

 

"I have to—"

 

"Please," Hannibal tells him again. "Sit."

 

Somewhere from the back of the house, the dogs all whine at once. Will drags his feet and pulls up a chair at the kitchen table. Hannibal puts down his Tupperware boxes and taps Will's shoulder until he raises his arms; takes Will's jacket off, hangs it up, and pulls his sweater-vest over his head. From behind, Hannibal unbuttons Will's shirt. "You cannot wear this," he says, at Will's vague protests. "It's filthy."

 

Will hadn't noticed.

 

Hannibal finds something passable in his drawers and puts it on him, buttoned right up to the collar. Then he makes idle small talk that doesn't require particular answers from Will as he sets to making their meal. It fills the house with the kind of smells that would usually make the dogs come running, but there's not a single peep from them.

 

When Hannibal presents Will with his immaculately plated food, Will hesitates. "I appreciate it—" he starts.

 

"Eat, please."

 

"I don't think I can right now," Will admits.

 

Hannibal looks at him very hard, the same way Will looks at a crime scene. He makes eye contact with Hannibal for as long as he can, and then looks down at his food. It's a little of everything, arugula salad and delicate clementine slices, cranberries, dry toasted walnuts, warm slices of a rich, fatty meat he can't quite put his finger on. Some kind of salami. Maybe; maybe not.

 

Hannibal is still watching him.

 

Then he picks up his chair with both hands and walks it around to Will, placing it beside him. When he sits, their knees touch. He angles Will's plate equidistant between the two of them, and delicately, with his fork, picks up two slices of the sausage, a few leaves, a single walnut. He does not lift them to Will's lips, but to his own. Hannibal chews once or twice.

 

And then he puts his free hand on the back of Will's neck and pulls their faces close, and doesn't stop when their noses bump, and doesn't stop when their mouths touch. Will makes a small noise, which is summarily dismissed.

 

Hannibal opens his mouth and hums for Will to do the same, and feeds him this way. Feeds him like a bird. Will can taste the meal and Hannibal's tongue both.

 

He takes the food and he swallows and he eats it. They get through the whole plate this way. It takes at least half an hour, and by the end of it Will is almost in Hannibal's lap.

 

"That wasn't so difficult," Hannibal says, smiling, as he clears the plates away.

 

*

 

Will goes to the bathroom as Hannibal's cleaning up, to scrub his hands and mouth. As he walks through the bedroom, he notices for the first time the piles of wet t-shirts dotted like punctuation marks across his floor; and between them, every single one of his dogs sitting silently like they've been ordered to.


End file.
